Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and may provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging, and other personal information manager application functions. Portable electronic devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, so-called smartphones, and laptop and pad/tablet-styled computers.
Many of these devices include, in addition to other wireless communications capabilities, Bluetooth™ capability. Bluetooth™ (hereinafter “Bluetooth”) refers to a wireless communications standard managed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The Bluetooth standard makes use of frequency-hopping spread spectrum techniques and typically provides for only a very short-range wireless connection (often offering a range of only about ten meters in many common application settings). This standard comprises a packet-based approach that relies upon a so-called master-slave paradigm where a master device can support a limited (plural) number of subservient devices.
Per one typical application setting a Bluetooth-capable smartphone couples (called “pairing”) via Bluetooth to a vehicle's audio-entertainment system. The Bluetooth standard then supports, for example, displaying the smartphone's contacts list at the vehicle's audio-entertainment system and initiating a cellular-telephony call via the smartphone in response to an occupant of the vehicle selecting a particular telephone number from that contacts list. The Bluetooth connection then carries the audio portion of that call to permit the incoming audio information to be rendered audible by the vehicle's audio-entertainment system and for the caller's spoken response as captured by the latter's microphone system to be transferred to the smartphone for transmission to the called party.
As useful as such capabilities are, however, the Bluetooth standard offers (more or less by design) only a limited set of capabilities in these regards. For example, while the Bluetooth standard natively carries spoken audio content in the context of a call as described above, in many cases the Bluetooth connection will not natively support carrying audio content for other purposes (such as, for example, conveying voice-based user instructions in service of some internal application of the receiving device).